6 juillet 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Kelsey Atherton
As the Pentagon's latest budget slouches towards Washington, a $716 billion beast waiting to be born, it is time to take a closer look at how the robots in the budget survived the various committees and drafts. As expected, the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act is a boon for drones, allocating funding for nearly three times as many uncrewed vehicles as in previous years. Most of those new drones are small, cheaper models, which is a trend reflecting in the other big spending increased in this budget: the Pentagon is set to spend almost twice as much on countering other drones in 2019 as it spend on that same in 2018.
The Association of Unmanned Vehicles System International has provided an in-depth look at how exactly the 1.4 percent of the defense budget allocated to drones is spent, detailing the minute differences in the comparatively meager $9.6 billion allocation. From the AUVSI's report:
Separating the President's Budget request by domain, we see that air is receiving the largest funding support with the budget for unmanned aircraft reaching almost $7 billion in FY2019, followed by $1.5 billion for counter unmanned systems (C-UxS), $1.3 billion for unmanned maritime vehicles and $0.7 billion for ground robotics. From FY2018 to FY2019, the budget for C-UxS technologies almost doubles. Figure 2 also shows the number of unique projects and sub-projects that involve unmanned systems relative to the domains in which they are operating. Cross-domain operations of air and ground unmanned vehicles are supported by the largest number of projects. Over 60 percent of these efforts are funded by the U.S. Army. The U.S. Navy is also working to provide solutions for interoperability and teaming of unmanned vehicles across multiple domains as they support over half of the projects involving operations in all domains (air, ground, and maritime).
For the counter-drone mission, the Pentagon is splitting $1.5 billion between over 90 different projects, ranging from modifications to existing missiles and anti-air systems to directed energy weapons to electronic warfare software. The largest share of the 2019 budget for counter-UAS is set to go to the Army's Indirect Fire Protection family of systems, though the most interesting projects aren't always the budget headliners.
Buried further down the spending list is DARPA's “Multi-Azimuth Defense Fast Intercept Round Engagement System” (MAD-FIRES) project, which a projectile as agile and useful for interception as a missile, but cheap enough to be fired and fielded like a bullet. There's also a submunitions project from the Air Force to “Exploit the signatures of ISR targets; capture and catalog multi-spectral signatures on asymmetric threat Unmanned Aerial Systems.” That project is dubbed “Chicken Little,” perhaps with the explicit goal of making the sky fall.
What the diversity of counter-drone programs, and drone programs generally, in the new Pentagon budget show is that this is still a young field, one with drone types and countermeasures all in flux. It's likely that future years will see more spending on counter drone tools, but it's also equally likely that the range of countermeasures will shrink as people fighting learn first-hand what does and doesn't work.
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By: Ian Bond As they look at the state of their coronavirus-hit economies and U.S. President Donald Trump's poor standing in opinion polls, many European leaders may be tempted to put on hold any plans to meet NATO's target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. But Europeans need to wake up. Trump is not a reliable ally, and the damage he has done to the trans-Atlantic partnership is likely to linger. Trump's hostility to NATO has been obvious since he called into question its Article 5 mutual defense guarantee during his last presidential campaign. We now know, according to former national security adviser John Bolton's tell-all memoir, that Trump was ready to pull the U.S. out of NATO at its 2018 summit. In recent weeks Trump announced without warning that the U.S. will withdraw 9,500 — more than one quarter — of the 34,500 troops it has stationed in Germany because the German government is not spending enough on defense. Then at a Washington press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump said a large number of NATO countries were “delinquent” and declared that Europe was taking “tremendous advantage of the United States on trade.” Trump may not understand how NATO works or the value to the U.S. of having troops in Germany, but it is true that the U.S. carries a disproportionately large share of the financial burden of defending Europe. During his presidency, Barack Obama also accused Europe of being “complacent” about its own defense — though he was rather more diplomatic. Only a handful of European NATO members have met the alliance's target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense over the past 20 years, while the U.S. has consistently exceeded it, spending 3.1-4.9 percent. But Europe's problem is not just the amount it spends on defense, but the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of its spending: Europeans get far too many systems and far too little military capability for their money. The European Commission's 2017 fact sheet on European defense reported that European Union member states operated 178 different major weapons systems; the U.S. had only 30. EU member states have 17 different types of main battle tank; the U.S. has one. This proliferation of weapons systems leads to high unit costs for short production runs, and a lack of interoperability. And European spending is not directed to ensuring that troops can fight when needed. The European members of NATO have almost 1.9 million active-duty troops, while the U.S. has 1.3 million and Russia about 900,000. But very few of the European forces can be deployed in a crisis. Politically and economically, this is a bad time to try to get European politicians to think seriously about increasing and rationalizing defense spending. The EU's economic forecast for spring 2020 foresees a contraction in real GDP of 7.4 percent this year, albeit followed by an increase of 6.1 percent in 2021. Some of Europe's biggest investors in defense are in NATO but not in the EU. The U.K. accounted for 16 percent of defense spending in Europe in 2019, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But despite some early promise, Britain seems to have lost interest in any institutionalized cooperation with the EU on foreign and security policy. Relations between the EU and NATO member Turkey, which accounted for another 7 percent of European defense spending last year, have rarely been worse. Despite such difficulties, the fact that NATO and the EU are currently both reassessing the security environment presents an opportunity for a more joint approach. NATO is engaged in the #NATO2030 process, which Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg hopes will strengthen political consultation in the alliance. Meanwhile, by the end of 2020 the EU aims to complete a process to assess the threats it faces, which the bloc calls its “strategic compass.” These two efforts need to complement each other to produce a shared view of the threats to Europe, and the creation of a forum for political dialogue on security where European countries, regardless of whether they belong to both the EU and NATO, can discuss appropriate responses. Europe's ability to counter threats will depend on making its money go further by spending it efficiently, both nationally and multilaterally. The commission should do more to ensure that more defense procurement involves competitive tendering, rather than member states awarding contracts to national champions. But it should not try to shut defense firms from non-EU NATO countries out of the European market. The commission stands more chance of influencing the research and procurement decisions of member states if it has a substantial budget to dangle in front of them. It should keep pushing back against cuts proposed earlier in the year to the defense elements of the EU's next seven-year budget. And the commission needs to be more open to the participation of “friendly” countries in EU-funded programs. Joe Biden, a former U.S. vice president and a contender in the current presidential race, would be an easier president for Europeans to work with than Trump has been. But Biden's victory in November is not guaranteed. Moreover, the forces in U.S. society that propelled Trump to power in 2016 will still exist, and may return in 2024. Even if they would rather pretend that nothing is changing, the EU and as many non-EU, Europe-based NATO members as are willing to do so need to pay attention to Trump's message. And they need to start thinking about how to defend Europe and deter potential adversaries with reduced U.S. help. Ian Bond is the director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform think tank. He was a member of the British diplomatic service for 28 years, most recently serving as political counselor and joint head of the foreign and security policy group in the British Embassy in the United States. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/07/03/europe-must-take-on-its-own-defense-responsibilities/